alexiss dawn

Yet another wonderful guest visited Blue Sky today. Brian Henson came today! We all gathered in a theater at the local cinema and listened to him talk about puppetry, watch clips, and even see some live puppet action for a good two hours. Pretty crazy.

He talked a lot about how puppetry has evolved for the Jim Henson company — from simple plain ol’ puppets, to animatronics, all the way up to CG puppetry. Lots of behind the scenes clips and stories. He pointed out how puppetry is loose and sloppy and improvised a lot of the time, where as traditional animation is planned out and solid. Neither is bad, just different styles. I’ve always been amazed at how much a simple puppet with an open-close mouth and solid eyes can emote so much.

He brought out a puppet throughout the afternoon. It was pretty cool to see him on the side of the theater acting with the puppet and seeing it alive on the giant theater screen. It was pretty hard to watch him instead of the seriously alive puppet on the screen.

It was interesting to see and hear him talk about how they do their puppetry. They don’t look up at their puppet while acting, but instead are looking at a monitor that shows them what the audience is seeing. So they have to constantly be focusing on the staging of the character.

Oh, and his advice for wannabe puppeteers? Get a puppet and start practicing! FAO Schwartz has Muppet Whatnots for sale now. Make your very own puppet. The tree house guys at work got theirs when the store first opened, and a few of us got ours this last week. Super great quality puppets if I do say so myself.

Overall a great speaker and a great guest to have at Blue Sky. The timing couldn’t be much better as we dig into crunch now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.